Over 600 killed in Syria as Security Forces Battle Pro-Assad Fighters.

Two days of clashes between security forces and loyalists of ousted President Bashar Assad and revenge killings that followed killed more than 600, a war monitoring group said on Saturday.

The death toll makes the clashes some of of the deadliest acts of violence since Syria’s conflict began 14 years ago.

And the clashes, which erupted on Thursday, marked a major escalation in the challenge to the new government in Damascus, three months after insurgents took authority after removing Assad from power.

The government has said that they were responding to attacks from remnants of Assad’s forces and blamed “individual actions” for the rampant violence.

Retribution killings between Sunnis and Alawites

The revenge killings that started on Friday by Sunni Muslim gunmen loyal to the government against members of Assad’s minority Shiite Alawite sect are a major blow to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the faction that led the overthrow of the former government. Alawites made up a large part of Assad’s support base for decades.

Residents of Alawite villages and towns spoke to The Associated Press about killings during which gunmen shot Alawites, the majority of them men, in the streets or at the gates of their homes. Many homes of Alawites were looted and then set on fire in different areas, two residents of Syria’s coastal region told the AP from their hideouts.

They asked that their names not be made public out of fear of being killed by gunmen, adding that thousands of people have fled to nearby mountains for safety.

Residents speak of atrocities in one town

Residents of Baniyas, one of the towns worst hit by the violence, said bodies were strewn on the streets or left unburied in homes and on the roofs of buildings, and nobody was able to collect them. One resident said that the gunmen prevented residents for hours from removing the bodies of five of their neighbours killed on Friday at close range.

Ali Sheha, a resident of Baniyas who fled with his family and neighbors hours after the violence broke out on Friday, said that at least 20 of his neighbours and colleagues in one neighborhood of Baniyas where Alawites lived, were killed, some of them in their shops and some in their homes.

Sheha called the attacks “revenge killings” of the Alawite minority for the crimes committed by Assad’s government. Other residents said the gunmen included foreign fighters, and militants from neighboring villages and towns.

“It was very very bad. Bodies were on the streets,” as he was fleeing, Sheha said, speaking by phone from nearly 20 kilometres away from the city. He said the gunmen were gathering less than 100 metres from his apartment building, firing randomly at homes and residents and in at least one incident he knows of, asked residents for their IDs to check their religion and their sect before killing them. He said the gunmen also burned some homes and stole cars and robbed homes.

euronews.